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Thursday, July 04, 2013

To Retain the Rights of Englishmen

By John F. Di Leo -

The Founding
Generation of Americans were Englishmen.

The term had
a special meaning, and was a badge of pride, no matter whether the individual
had a drop of English blood or not.

The people
of the thirteen Atlantic coast colonies in those years were already a diverse
group, as these colonies had been settled by not just Englishmen but Scots,
Irish, Dutch, Germans, Swiss, Danes, Frenchmen, and still others.

These
settlers, or their parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents, had come to
these shores for many reasons – religious liberty, freedom from persecution, a
fresh start in a land without the same old social classes as back home, a
chance to prosper in a land brimming with opportunity.

There were
other colonies too, all over the world, that they could have chosen. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch
also had established colonies, in South America, Africa, and Asia. But these settlers didn’t choose those
countries. Brazil, Quebec, Argentina,
India, Mexico, and many more of these other colonies had natural resources,
lovely scenery, exotic locales. But
there was a reason that our ancestors chose to settle on what is now the United
States’ east coast: There they would be
settling alongside Englishmen, and they would become Englishmen themselves.

The Legacy of the Magna Carta

The English
had a different relationship with royalty than most other countries. The French and Spanish had absolute monarchs;
the Italian and German city-states had a mixture of kings and dukes and
emperors who often got away with ruling by fiat. The rights of man were often denied by the
might of royalty.

But the
English had seen a steady improvement in the relationship of the people and
their government over the centuries. Not
just a flash in the pan moment like Macchiavelli’s brief Florentine republic,
but a steady decline in the power of the British crown, a steady increase in
the power of the British Parliament.

This process
had begun centuries before, when English nobles forced King John to the table
and made him sign the Magna Carta in 1215. The Provisions of Oxford followed in
1258, establishing an elected council of 24, and ensuring that Parliament would
meet three times a year.

The Petition
of Right came along in 1628, forbidding the king from billeting soldiers in
people’s homes, restraining him from issuing his own taxes in addition to
Parliament’s, restricting his ability to impose martial law or imprison British
subjects without cause. The Bill of
Rights followed in 1689, further limiting the king by codifying the freedom of
speech, the right to bear arms, certain religious liberties, guarantees of
regular elections.

There were
many more such acts throughout the centuries.
Great Britain has no single Constitution like our own, but this gradual
march toward ever-greater liberty served as a beacon to a certain type of
immigrant – the right kind of immigrant – and caused people seeking that new
start to gravitate toward Great Britain’s colonies over those of her rivals’. And of all Britain’s colonies, those on the
North American coast seemed the most evocative of the mother country; more
English in feel, with the added freedom of distance and open land for
expansion.

It was the
perfect place for the right kind of immigrants – those who valued the
opportunity to prosper from hard work, to practice the worship of the Good Lord
in the Judeo-Christian denomination of their choice, to write and speak and
participate in the community without fear of the crushing boot of government.

The Erosion of Rights

Unexpectedly,
however, the 18th Century saw an erosion of these rights in the
American colonies.

Perhaps in a
reaction to the Bill of Rights of 1689, the British monarchs began to act out…
they started restrictions on our very independent colonies. During the 1700s, they began ever-increasing
controls on the mercantile options available to the colonists, because
Parliament gave the king greater latitude abroad than it gave him at home.

During the
1700s, Parliament strengthened itself in England, establishing the
cabinet-style government, led by a prime minister, that it retains to this
day. Prime Ministers like Sir Robert
Walpole ensured that the people of England were secure from the infringement of
their long-established rights by a foreign-born king. The Hanoverian kings weren’t detested, but as
the first two of the three Georges were born abroad, the people wanted a strong
Parliament to ensure that the rights of Englishmen were not abused by “German
despots.”

And so these
three King Georges made a show of fully respecting the English, at home… and
fulfilled their fantasy of old-style autocratic power by taking advantage of
the fact that colonists had no seats in Parliament to speak up for them. By the 1750s, colonies were beginning to send
representatives to London to find some manner of redress, most famously,
Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, who traveled to England in 1757 to represent
Pennsylvania alone, but ended up the hired diplomat for Georgia, Massachusetts,
and New Jersey too by the end, serving
in this capacity through the outbreak of hostilities in 1775.

There were
colonies in which the King forbade certain Christian denominations… or
compelled the taxpayer support of a favored one. There were colonies in which going businesses
had their licenses yanked outright, as the king decided to grant monopoly
rights to English firms. George
Washington’s farm at Mount Vernon, for example, had its own foundry, which had
been closed at the king’s order, to force colonists to be dependent on the
mother country for such things.

By the late
1760s, most American colonists were forbidden from trading directly with other
countries; George III decreed that if we wanted to trade with Holland, or
Italy, or Denmark, or India, we would have to buy and sell through factors
(middlemen) in London. These London
factors, no matter how honest and well-intentioned, were an often unnecessary
additional burden on the process of international trade, making commerce costlier,
ever more indebting the colonists, wrecking the plan of limitless potential for
prosperity that our Founders and their ancestors had expected from this open
land.

Those who
think of our Founders’ complaints as mere “taxation without representation” are
unaware of the extent of these denials of the Colonists’ freedoms. It wasn’t just a matter of raising tax rates
from two percent to three, or from three percent to four.

The king had
shuttered manufacturers on these shores.
He forbade our direct sale of goods to most other countries. He had
broken promises to support westward expansion, and worse, broken promises of
that western land to colonial veterans who had served England honorably in the
French and Indian War. He had quartered
troops in our homes, more to threaten us than to threaten invaders. He had
authorized his governors to disregard traditional English rules governing
prosecutions – holding prisoners without trial, and denying trial by jury.

Worst of
all, he repeatedly closed American legislatures, denying the public their right
as Englishmen to self-government, enshrined in the English psyche since
1215. And he even put one town – Boston
– under martial law for seven years.

Is it any
wonder the Americans finally had enough?

Who to Blame?

One of our
Founders’ greatest challenges was allocating blame for all these
injustices. Since we knew we had friends
in Parliament – the Rockingham/Burke faction – we long assumed our opponents
were the majority in Parliament.

So our
Founders long retained their traditional pride in being Englishmen, directing
their anger at Parliament. Only at the
very end did it become truly clear that King George III was acting the role of
a tyrant – that not only his obvious direct actions, but the negative actions
of Parliament as well, were all the doing of King George.

Bristling at
the constraints placed upon the monarch by five centuries of English patriots,
King George III became adept at the art of corruption. He utilized techniques worthy of a Chicago or
Tammany Hall machine to control the majority in parliament. By doling out appointments, favors,
knighthoods, contracts, and monopolies, George III was usually able to see that
his man became prime minister.

Prime
Minister Frederick North, therefore, the focus of colonial fury throughout the
1770s, was in fact a mere puppet of George III.
The corrupt Lord North became what Tolkien fans would think of as “The
Mouth of Sauron,” a man who had long since traded away his ability to think for
himself, a man who was merely the incarnation of his master in another body,
another place.

Much of this
was only discerned by later historians, amazed at the machinations by which
George III had managed to direct a theoretically independent Parliament. But even by 1776, enough was understood that
the American colonists could properly focus their anger – not at the British
people, not at the legitimately elected Members of Parliament like the Marquess
of Rockingham and Edmund Burke – but at this tyrannical king alone.

The Declaration of Independence

And so it
was, in June and July of 1776, that the delegates to the Continental Congress
finally voted to pass and sign the Declaration of Independence – authored by
Virginia Delegate Thomas Jefferson (but much amended) – a document that would
set forth before the world the grounds under which we were issuing this
separation.

What many
forget, when they read this magnificent document, is that it is not a radical
declaration of rights that an upstart nation is claiming for itself. Rather, the Declaration lists specific
violations of our people’s rights as Englishmen. These were rights guaranteed to us by five
and a half centuries of British law, which a corrupt and tyrannical king sought
to illegally deny. He could never
have gotten away with such abuses on English soil, but because the colonists
were an ocean away, lacking direct representation of their own, it was possible
for awhile.

He got away
with it, in fact, more and more every year, despite the screams of a vocal
minority in Parliament to oppose it.
“You CAN’T do this!” they would scream at Lord North, but they were
drowned out, voted down by a majority that didn’t represent the colonies, so
they didn’t care, or that was too dependent on the king’s favors to act
independently, even when the right move was so crystal clear.

The Declaration
of Independence, so cherished by Americans for over two centuries now, was a
declaration of a tyrant’s personal action, a recognition that this tyrant had
severed the bonds between our lands far more permanently than even an ocean
could ever do. This tyrant made it
necessary for us to separate from England, in order that we might again have
the birthright that patriots for centuries had worked to guarantee for us.

That
declaration set in motion a world war – along with a revolution in philosophy,
economics, and political science – and established the eternal obligation of
American statesmen to devote their focus to the preservation of these rights.

The question
of how best to accomplish that goal – how best to design a government that
would secure these rights for all time, and protect against corruptors and
corruptees like George III and Lord North – would have to wait another eleven
years, until the magnificent Constitutional Convention produced the document
that has guided this nation ever since.

But today,
and every year on July 4, we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, that
bold move in which we Americans took it upon ourselves to declare and secure
our own liberties. And we celebrate the
Founding Fathers themselves, those courageous visionaries who pledged their
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor that we might be free, more than
two centuries thereafter.

Copyright 2013 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a
Chicago-based Customs broker and trade
compliance manager. A former president
of the Ethnic American Council and a former Milwaukee County Republican Party
Chairman, he has now been a recovering politician for over sixteen years.

Permission is hereby granted to
forward freely, provided it is uncut and the byline and IR URL are
included. Follow John F. Di Leo on
LinkedIn or Facebook, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo.

Comments

The term had
a special meaning, and was a badge of pride, no matter whether the individual
had a drop of English blood or not.

The people
of the thirteen Atlantic coast colonies in those years were already a diverse
group, as these colonies had been settled by not just Englishmen but Scots,
Irish, Dutch, Germans, Swiss, Danes, Frenchmen, and still others.

These
settlers, or their parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents, had come to
these shores for many reasons – religious liberty, freedom from persecution, a
fresh start in a land without the same old social classes as back home, a
chance to prosper in a land brimming with opportunity.